


Moving On

by BleedingInk



Series: I'll Miss Missing You Now And Then [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Humans, Discussions of Homophobia, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Megstiel - Freeform, Most of the angst is in the past though, Past Megifer, past Destiel, past abusive relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-07 21:59:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11067969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: Castiel and Meg tell each other about their worst heartbreak so they can move on together.





	Moving On

She moves like a cat.

They have been living together for six months at this point, dating for a year before Meg’s lease in her old apartment ended and he pointed out she already spent most nights in his place anyway. And Castiel still freaks out sometimes when he turns around in the kitchen to find her sitting on the table, wearing his shirt and sleepily asking him what’s for breakfast because he didn’t hear her moving the chair. He never hears her closing the door or throwing her keys on the table when she gets home from work. He’s woken several times in the morning or in the middle of the night to not find her there by his side, because when she leaves the bed she manages to do it without waking him up. Even if he fell asleep with his arms around her, holding her against his body, she still manages to slip from his grasp as if she was lighter than air.

Not only is she silent as a cat, she has the temperament of one too. She squirms when he hugs her and sometimes turns her face away when he tries to kiss her. If he touches her hair for too long or caresses her the wrong way, she will push his hands away; gently or harshly, that really depends on her mood. Sometimes she will initiate the physical contact, but Castiel has noticed it’s only when she wants to have sex. She never just hugs him or kisses him for the hell of it. She gets grumpy when she’s hungry and she has terrible eating habits; she would live exclusively on takeaway and beer if Castiel didn’t bother to make some actual meals from her. She spends long periods of time quiet, reading her magazines or just resting with her head on his lap. She works a lot, for long exhausting hours in the hospital, so she’s almost always tired when she comes home and if she has the night shift, Castiel can find her napping in the couch at the strangest hours.

She has secrets that come out in bursts when he’s least expecting them.

“You know, being a nurse wasn’t even my original plan,” she told him one time when she got away with hers and convinced Castiel of ordering pizza instead of cooking dinner. “I did a couple of years of pre-med after high school. Still think how nice that would have been, you know? For people to call me Dr. Masters.”

She said it as a joke, but of course Castiel took it seriously.

“Why don’t you go back to school now?” he asked. She scoffed as if he had suggested something stupid or impossible. “I mean it. You have a stable job to pay for the tuition, you already have some expertise from working at the hospital…”

“It’s a pipe dream, Clarence,” she interrupted him, shaking her head. “What would that even achieve?”

Castiel was about to say “it would make you happy”, but he stopped himself. Meg is a very practical person. She doesn’t like poetry or cheesy declarations of love. The first time he told her he was in love with her, she practically laughed in his face. It took him a long time to convince her it was true and even now he sometimes catches her looking at him with distrust. As if she can’t believe how good a life they have together. As if she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Castiel knows all of this has something to do with her ex-boyfriend. Meg hasn’t told him about him, preferring to skirt around the topic of past relationships, but her family sure did. He still doesn’t have enough details to reconstruct the full story, but they let on enough that Castiel could deduce Meg’s ex hadn’t been a stand up person.

It happened over the Thanksgiving weekend, after they had been dating for five months, even though she still refused to call him her boyfriend and hold his hand in public at that point. They went to visit her father and her brother at her hometown. In a moment when Meg left them alone, Mr. Masters approached him with fire in his yellow-tinted eyes.

“Listen to me, boy,” he said, lowering his voice to a threatening whisper. “Meg seems to like you a lot, but she hasn’t made the best decisions in the past regarding this. If you hurt a hair of her head, I can assure you that will be the last thing you ever do.”

Castiel assured him he would never hurt Meg, that he wanted to make her happy, but Mr. Masters didn’t look convinced.

“The last one also said that,” he replied. “You know how that ended? I chased him out of here with a baseball bat when he came looking for Meg. I’m not fucking around, boy. I will destroy you.”

Castiel had been a little scared by the intensity of Mr. Master’s threats, but Meg’s brother Tom, a very stoic guy compared to his father, shed some light into his reasons.

“You have to forgive the old man’s manners. You know, that’s what happens when your daughter shows up home one night with a black eye,” he explained to Castiel during a smoke break right before dessert.

“He hit her?” Castiel asked, horrified that Meg hadn’t confided that story to him.

Tom crooked his eyebrow, in a very similar gesture to what Meg does when she’s expecting Castiel to realize he has just pointed out the obvious. Then he dropped his cigarette and stepped on it to turn it off.

“Anyway, dad will kill you if you pull a stunt like that,” he concluded, in the same tone of voice as he would if he had been commenting on the weather. “And just FYI, I will help him get rid of your body.”

Castiel didn’t have a doubt in his mind that they weren’t being at all hyperbolic. He also right then and there decided to kick the habit of smoking, just because he didn’t want to have to spend another smoking break alone with Tom, ever.

That was the first and last time that the topic of Meg abusive ex came up, but it went a long way into explaining Meg’s reluctance within their own relationship. Castiel did his best to show her he only intended to love her and take care of her, and slowly but surely, his efforts came to fruition. Meg started accepting spending the night, she started referring to him as “her boyfriend” and she even began to be less adverse to public displays of affection.

Castiel is happy. Sometimes he can’t believe just how happy he is, so happy that his heart could burst. Some mornings, he wakes up before her and watches her sleeping face and has to pinch himself. He’s dating a giant cat, a wonderful woman with a terrible temper and a sharp tongue who disbeliefs everything, even herself. He wouldn’t change it for the world.

“Damn, it’s really easy to make you happy, isn’t it?” Meg teases him one night when they’re on the couch binging on police procedurals on their pajamas. She’s free the following day and he has already finished grading his tests. They can stay up late and spend the next morning in bed if they choose to.

Castiel has his fingers tangled in her hair, watching her closely. He pauses and when she realizes that he’s gone silent for several minutes, she moves her eyes from the screen to his face with a slight frown.

“What?”

“Just… I never thought I could have this,” he explains. “This… normalcy.”

“Shut up. We’re far from normal,” Meg protests.

Castiel smiles and doesn’t contradict her. They seem like a pretty normal couple to him and he was sure they would look so to any outside observer. But if it makes Meg happy to deny their normalcy, he isn’t going to burst her bubble.

“Damn, she must have really done a number on you,” she snickers, shaking her head.

“She?” Castiel frowns.

“The girl whose mix tapes you keep at the top shelf of the closet,” Meg explains. She sinks an elbow on his stomach and props herself up. “I found them when I was looking for the flashlight during the last black out. Was I not supposed to know about that?”

“No, it’s not exactly a secret,” Castiel says, sincerely. “I… I’ve forgotten I still had them, that’s all.”

He goes quiet, not really certain what to say next. Meg is watching him with those big brown eyes of hers and a crooked eyebrow. She almost looks like he’s a mouse and she’s trying to find the best way to catch him.

“I’ll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours,” she insists.

Castiel doesn’t know where this curiosity is coming from, but he sees nothing wrong with it. It’s an old story, after all. He tangles his fingers in her hair and wonders where to being.

“Well, first of all, it’s a he,” he corrects her. “I’ve told you I’ve had boyfriends in the past. He… he was the first, though.”

He stops for a second. He doesn’t know if he means the first boy he fell in love with or the first person he ever loved, in general. Both can be true. Even though it’s been so long now, there’s still a dull ache in his chest when he thinks about him. Not like it used to, no, not like right after they broke up. He doesn’t miss him, but he misses the thing that could have been if it had ended differently.

“What’s his name?” Meg asks him,

“Dean Winchester,” Castiel replies and in saying it out loud, it’s a bit like exorcising that pain. “We met in college. Before him, all throughout high school, I had… caught myself sometimes looking at boys I liked. Actors I found handsome. I come from a very conservative, very religious family, so I was ashamed that anyone would discover it. But at the same time I was relieved because I also liked girls, so that meant I wasn’t really… like that. I was taught all my life homosexuality was sinful, but also a choice; and I figured as long as I had those thoughts but didn’t act on them, I wouldn’t have to go to hell. I know it’s stupid,” he adds when he hears Meg chuckling.

She shakes her head. “It’s not stupid. We tell each other all sort of things when we’re young.”

She glances away, probably thinking about her own excuses. Castiel gently pulls from her hair so she would look at him, and when she does, she smiles as if there’s nothing wrong at all.

“Go on.”

“So I went to college. I was eighteen, it was the first time I was away from home, exposed to new ideas, new people,” Castiel continues. “I met this girl Charlie. She was quirky and fun and I liked her. So I asked her out, because that is what you do when you like a person of the opposite gender, right? And she laughed in my face.”

“Ouch.”

“She had a good reason to reject me, though, and it was her utter lack of interest in men in general,” Castiel says, smiling to himself at the memory. “She sincerely thought I was joking, because she couldn’t have made it clearer she was a lesbian. Thinking back now, it was pretty obvious. She had a rainbow bracelet she always wore and a shirt with Princess Leia in the golden bikini.”

“Must have been a cultural shock for you,” Meg comments, still chuckling.

“I was baffled, yes,” Castiel admits. “I think I might have offended her, because I babbled out something about God loving her anyway. But she was kind enough not to let that come between our friendship. She was very patient with me, explaining away doubts and misconceptions I had. I found out the word for what I am is bisexual and that took me a while to accept. But even after I did, I was still convinced that acting out on my male crushes would land me straight in hell.” He pauses to take a deep breath. “And then, there was Dean.”

Meg shifts on top of his chest to look at him, correctly predicting he’s approaching the part of the story when things get complicated.

“Charlie introduced us. She dragged us both to watch a midnight screening of a Star Wars movie. I don’t remember which one because I was too busy being enthralled by Dean. He had green eyes and freckles on his nose. He complained all the way because he was a Star Trek fan. He thought it was funny how I didn’t get all the references he dropped and the lyrics he sang.” Castiel laughs. “By the end of the night, I was convinced this was going to be the boy I was going to hell for.”

“That’s a pretty hardcore declaration of love,” Meg comments.

She tries to make it sound casual, as if she doesn’t really care, but Castiel can tell it affects her. Meg doesn’t usually get jealous, even when Castiel thinks she might. But he can tell she’s jealous of Dean now. Perhaps, in the past, she would have had good reasons to be. God knew some of Castiel’s other exes had reasons to be.

But not her. Never her. He leans over and places a kiss on top of her head.

“I fell pretty hard for him,” he confesses. “It took a while after that night for us to get together. Dean dated girls and slept around. He tried to convince me I should too. I deflected, saying I was busy with my studies, trying to graduate on time, that I didn’t have time for a relationship. The truth was I don’t think I could have dated someone else when I was so fixated on him. It wouldn’t have been fair for the other person. I knew it wasn’t a good thing, to be this in love without ever hoping he would reciprocate. But I was just happy being his friend and… I think he knew. I think, on a certain level he must have known.” He makes a pause. “Otherwise, why would he have showed up drunk at my dorm after a pretty awful break-up he had with the girl he was dating at the time? Why would he have kissed me first?”

“He used you to bounce back?”

“I know now it wasn’t the most solid beginning for a relationship. Dean freaked out the following day, insisting it had been a fluke, that he didn’t really like guys at all, that it was better to pretend it hadn’t happened. I was brokenhearted to hear it, but at the same time, I was happy it happened. Little did I know; that would become how I would feel about every single aspect of our relationship.”

He moves a little to hug Meg closer. It’s not easy to tell what happened next, but then again, nothing about being with Dean had really been easy.

“We had our ups and downs. Dean… his family was also conservative, in a different way than mine. His mother had died when he was very young and his father was an ex-marine with very inflexible ideas of what a man should be like. Needless to say, taking home anyone other than a pretty girl was out of the question for the both of us. I didn’t mind lying to my family, but sometimes Dean came back from Thanksgiving or the winter break looking like he had just had the roughest week ever. As if he was disappointing his father just by being with me. We fought, he would storm out and I’d swear to myself I wasn’t going to take him back. I always took him back.”

“How long were you together?”

“All through college. Almost four years,” Castiel says. “Around the third year he proposed we should get an apartment together. I was happy. I thought this meant we were taking a step in the right direction for us having a normal relationship. I should have known it was actually because he didn’t want people to gossip about how he came into my dorm some nights and didn’t leave until the following day.”

“Clarence, you’re not really selling this guy to me,” Meg interrupts him. “I was prepared to believe that he was just as madly in love with you, but you’re making it sound like he was giving you scraps all the time. I mean, you’re definitely painting him like a massive jerk.”

“Well, I’m not going to defend him if you think like that,” Castiel states, with a sad smirk. “I spent plenty of time doing that already while we were together and right after. All I can say is that he wasn’t always a massive jerk. We had good times, too. We used to go on road trips on the summer because he liked to drive and he liked to see all of these small towns and tourist traps at the edge of the road. He cared so much for his little brother; he talked about him all the time. He made me those mix tapes because he was so excited to share his musical tastes with me. I truly believed the good far outweighed the bad and that made it all worth it.”

Meg looks at him skeptically, like she can’t be sure his reasoning is very sound. Castiel would like to add he was in his twenties and it was the first time he fell in love, so it made sense to him. But then again, he doesn’t care to justify what happened. He doesn’t have a single regret for the decisions he took, including the decision of finally walking away from Dean.

“It ended right after we graduated,” he tells her. “We had to think about the future and my picture of the future included him.”

“Let me guess, his didn’t,” Meg points out.

“He said we should leave good enough alone. We were happy just being together, we didn’t have to do things differently. I disagreed. I knew if we didn’t make a choice right then, then we wouldn’t be together at all. I went home for the summer and I started applying to teach at schools in Kansas. Not in his hometown, but nearby. When my family asked why the hell I wanted to move to Kansas, I told them.” He sighs, remembered the debacle that followed that confession. “It wasn’t… it wasn’t pretty. My sisters suspected, my brothers were completely mystified. My mother was… she wasn’t happy. We had a fight that turned into a screaming match that turned into me swearing never to speak to them again and her telling me it was just as well to her, because no son of hers would be a dirty homosexual. It was bad.”

“No shit.”

“I called Dean. I told him what I had done. I expected him to tell me I could come over at his place or that we would meet in ours, to talk things out. To help me calm down and assure me I had done the right thing by burning that bridge because he would be waiting for me at the other side. When I finished talking, there was a long silence at the end of the line and then he said ‘ _Cas, why in the hell would you do that?’_.”

“Holy fuck, what an asshole,” Meg mutters. Castiel can’t blame her.

“It dawned on me that he wasn’t going to do the same thing for me. I would forever be his dirty little secret and that was the life that I could expect if I stayed. I had… known, at some level, that he wouldn’t,” Castiel confesses. “But I didn’t expect… I had a lot to think about during that eight hours drive. Once I made it back to our apartment, I called Dean again and told him I was leaving. I had no idea where I would go: I couldn’t go home, I didn’t have a job yet. But I knew if I stayed, if I waited until he came back, he would convince me to stay and nothing would change. So I gave him an ultimatum: he either told his father about us, accepted the consequences and came home so we figured out a way to move on together; or I was moving on without him. He told me he couldn’t do it. I told him we had nothing left to talk about then.”

“Good,” Meg says. It comes out almost a growl, as if she’s angry with Dean for putting him through that, even when Castiel isn’t. Not anymore anyway.

“I packed my things. I waited for a day. A part of me was sure he would show up or that he would call me again begging me to wait. He didn’t. So I put it all my things in my car, everything I could take with me, because I didn’t want to come back ever, and I left. I drove aimlessly for what felt like weeks. I slept in my car at the edge of the road sometimes. I took temporary jobs cleaning motels in exchange for a room or serving tables at whatever local restaurant was hiring. I drank a lot, too, on nights when I though I couldn’t sleep without him at the other side of the bed. I just… drifted. I was completely lost and alone. But I didn’t want anybody to find me.”

“That was a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“Probably.” Castiel laughs. “But I needed the quiet. I needed some time to figure myself out and accept that I had completely destroyed my previous life for a person who wasn’t brave enough to come with me. There was no turning back and I had to think of where to go next.”

“And where did you go?”

“Here,” Castiel says, pointing at the city they can see beyond the window. “After a few months, I rolled in town without any money and took a job in a Gas-N-Sip. I decided it was as good as any place to stay and started dropping curriculums. I was offered a position as a substitute teacher with the possibility of it becoming a full time job and I accepted. Then, one day, years later, a pipe in the school’s ceiling broke down and there was a water spill. I slipped, I fell and hit my head pretty hard against the lockers. I had to be rushed to the hospital, where this really beautiful nurse patched me up…”

Meg punches him in the arm. He guesses he doesn’t need to tell her the story of how they met, but he feels compelled to include it anyway. If he was drifting, if he has been on a journey without an end in sight, it just makes sense to him that the destination was Meg all along.

“Come on, there must have been people in between,” she insists.

“Of course there were,” Castiel admits. “There was April, Nora, Balthazar. There was Daphne. She… I was with her for about a year. She was my longest relationship after Dean and before you.”

“What happened to her?”

“Well, I hadn’t talked to my family in years,” Castiel explains. “But I figured it had been a long time, that we couldn’t stay mad at each other forever. Daphne encouraged me, too. So I contacted my sister Hannah and she told me I should come home for Christmas, that everybody would be happy to see me. I was so nervous and Daphne was so patient with me. We got there and everybody hugged me and I thought things could be like before. Maybe we could start rebuilding some sort of relationship. But then, we were having dinner and my mother commented how glad she was I wasn’t ‘ _committing the sin of sodomy_ ’ anymore.”

“Oh, she didn’t,” Meg says.

“She did,” Castiel confirms bitterly. “It was awkward for everybody. Especially for Daphne, because I hadn’t told her the exact reason I had a falling out with my family. She had thought it was because I had a crisis of faith and didn’t want to go to church anymore. It… she didn’t take it well. She was also religious and while not as intolerant as my mother, she didn’t know what to do with this information. My sexuality made her uncomfortable. She started asking things like if I would cheat on her with a man or if I had ever tested myself for HIV. The answer were, respectively, no and of course I had because I’m not an idiot. Eventually we decided it was best if we broke up. I also didn’t go back to spend Christmas with my family. I talk to Hannah now and then, but… it’s not like we’re desperate to see each other.”

“Well, hey, silver lining: we don’t have to argue about where to spend the holidays,” Meg points out.

Castiel laughs and leans a little to kiss her on the head again. She looks up at him with a beam and moves up, caging him in her arms before kissing him. Her long dark hair forms a veil around the two as he places a hand on her cheek and slides another down her back. He knows she’s going to suggest they move this to the bed, but they aren’t done talking just yet.

“What about you?”

“What about me?” she purrs as she leans down to kiss him underneath the ear. She’s trying to distract him and it’s working wonderfully.

“You said you would tell me about him,” Castiel points out. He doesn’t need to clarify who he means. Meg freezes and looks up, with a look in her eyes that Castiel wishes to never have to see again: they’re big and bright in pure fear. “You don’t have to,” he adds quickly. “You don’t have to tell me. I don’t need to know.”

“No.” Meg shakes her head and breathes in deeply. When she opens her eyes again, there’s the same determined look he’s used to seeing in her face. “No, it’s only fair.”

She still stays quiet for so long that the “Are you still watching?” sign flashes in the screen. Castiel turns the TV off and holds Meg tight until she’s ready to speak.

“Well, I don’t have to tell you most of it. You know how it goes. Girl meets boy who’s a few years older and charming as hell, girls falls for boy fast, boy convinces her to move in even though it’s only been a few months. Boy puts his fist through the kitchen wall and then through girl’s nose. Girl stays with boy anyway because she’s convinced she can change him.” She lets out a bitter laugh. “I was so stupid.”

“You weren’t stupid.”

“Oh, spare me. I’ve read all the psychological bullshit about abused women and why they stay with their asshole boyfriends. And I don’t know about everyone else, but I stayed because I was stupid.” She takes a deep breath. “I stayed because I believed it when Luc told me no one would ever love me like he did and that the only thing I was good for was to be with him. I think that says a lot more about me than it does about him.”

“No, I don’t think it does,” Castiel contradicts her, but he realizes she doesn’t believe him. It doesn’t matter. He makes a purpose to tell her every single day from then on. He rubs her arm and pets her hair, letting her know that he’s there for her, that he would never hurt her that way.

“But, you know… as bad as that was, that wasn’t the worst of all,” Meg explains. “I had friends who told me I needed to get out of that relationship fast and they were right, but I resented them because I thought they were being patronizing as hell. I was convinced that if it ever got really bad, if Luc didn’t clean up his act one of these days, I could leave whenever I chose to. And then Luc tried to take that choice away from me.”

She shifts in his arms and gently pushes him away. Castiel wants to keep on hugging her, but he realizes that what he really needs to do right now is just listen to her.

“He didn’t like it that I took birth control pills because he said they make me moody and he would flush them down the toilet if he found them. But I refused to have sex with him if he didn’t wear a condom, so he would humor me. It was one of the few things in which I stood firmly and he didn’t try to get away with his, which should have made it suspicious as all hell in hindsight. But I didn’t think much of it until I started feeling sick in the mornings and missed my period.”

“Meg…” Castiel mutters.

“Turns out, he was poking holes in the condoms we used with a needle,” Meg continues. She laughs again, but he can see her eyes growing red. “He was trying to get me pregnant, because if we had a kid, I would never be able to leave him. I would forever be tied to him. It came to me like a revelation as I sat in the toilet holding the positive test. I saw it so clearly right then. Everyone who had told me I needed to get out was right.”

“Meg…” Castiel says again, because now Meg’s voice is breaking and he really doesn’t need to know the rest of it and he’s sorry he ever asked. He puts an arm around her shoulders and pulls her close and this time, she doesn’t try to move away.

“I somehow managed not to panic,” Meg continues, swallowing down her own tears. “I called my friend Ruby and she came to see me right away. She didn’t have to do that. I had shunned her months before but when I needed her, she showed up as if nothing had happened. We came up with a plan. She drove me to a clinic where she knew some people and pulled a few strings so we only had to wait the minimum legal amount of time for them to give me an appointment. I had to act like nothing was wrong for a couple of days, and oh, God, I was terrified. That Luc would suspect, that he would find out somehow. If he knew I was pregnant, he would know what I was about to do and he wouldn’t let me out of the house for the following nine months. But finally the day came and…”

Her voice breaks down. Castiel’s hold grows tighter around her.

“You had an abortion.”

“I had an abortion,” she confirms a few seconds later, between whimpers. “What else could I have done?”

Castiel doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he would have done had he been in her shoes and of course he can never know. He doesn’t think Meg regrets it either, she’s crying because she’s remembering the fear and the tension she must have gone through those days. Finally, she takes a couple of deep breaths and manages to calm down.

“But you know, even if I told him what I’ve done, he would’ve tried again, so I had to go away. Ruby came home with me so I could pick up my stuff. Luc was there and we had a terrible fight and of course, he hit me. He didn’t know Ruby was waiting for me outside and when she heard us scream, she barged in and threatened to call the police. Only then he stopped and let me leave. I went straight to dad’s, and he didn’t ask any questions. He just took me in. Luc came looking for me some days later and… well, I’m sure dad told you about the baseball bat incident.”

“He alluded to it, yes.”

Meg laughs and snuggles closer to him. His pajama shirt is already wet with her tears, but he really doesn’t care.

“You drifted away when you broke up with Dean. When I broke up with Luc, I sank. My therapist said I had a major depressive episode. I didn’t have the energy to do anything. If dad hadn’t cooked for me, I probably would’ve starved to death. Some mornings I couldn’t even get out of bed. I dropped out of college… scratch that, I completely drop out from the face of the earth. For months. I couldn’t even think about going back, not with everything that had happened. And you know what the most fucked up part was? I missed him like hell.”

“It isn’t fucked up,” Castiel tells her. “He hurt you. You needed to heal. You needed to learn how to function without him.”

“I guess,” Meg mutters and snuggles closer to him. “I didn’t tell dad what I’ve done. Or Tom. The only other person who knows is Ruby. And… you, now. I guess.”

Castiel slowly pushes her away. He puts his hands on her cheeks and kisses the tip of her nose.

“Thank you.”

Meg’s eyes become a little wider, and there’s confusion in the furrow in her brow.

“For what?”

“For telling me. For trusting me,” he says, rubbing circles with his thumbs over her skin. “I love you.”

Meg pushes his hands away to crawl up in his lap. When she looks at him, she’s smiling again.

“You’re such a sap, Clarence,” she says before kissing him.

 

* * *

 

Castiel finds the mix tapes in the highest shelf in the closet, just where Meg told him they were. He opens the box and watches the familiar handwriting on the titles, a pang of nostalgia tugging his heart. It’s almost a miracle he didn’t lose them in the time he spent bouncing everywhere. He can’t tell why he held on to them for so long to begin with. Perhaps because he knew there was no turning back when he closed the apartment door behind him.

It’s been ten years since the last time he saw or spoke to Dean. Those first years without him had been the hardest, but now… now he’s happy. If someone had told him while he was driving aimlessly that he one day would be this happy, Castiel wouldn’t have believed it.

But there he is.

He closes the box and takes it outside. He needs to find out what he can do with old mix tapes, if there’s somewhere he can donate them or recycle them. It feels wrong to just throw them away.

Meg is using his laptop when he approaches the living room. She’s staring at the screen, tapping the table with her fingers pensively.

“What are you doing?” Castiel asks, as he sets the box down.

Meg doesn’t seem to hear him, so he cranes his neck and looks over her shoulder.

“You’re looking into med schools?”

Meg startles and turns to him as if only now she’s realizing he’s there.

“Don’t do that!” she snaps at him.

It’s strange: she’s the one who always manages to sneak up on him. Castiel savors the moment because he doesn’t know when or if he’ll ever managed to do it again. He drags a chair closer and sits next to her.

“Are you considering going back?”

“Well, I was,” she replies. “Then I saw the programs and the tuition and like hell I’ll be able to make it. I would have to cut down hours from the hospital and I wouldn’t have enough money to cover my part of the rent…”

“I could take care of the rent,” Castiel suggests.

Meg rolls her eyes at him and looks away. When he doesn’t say anything for a moment, she stares at him.

“Wait, you’re serious?”

“I was affording this place on my own before you came to live here,” he points out. “It wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Clarence, come on. I could never pay you back. And we don’t know how long is going to take.”

“You already have a lot of hands on experience,” he reminds her. “You’re not starting from zero. And you can pay me back when you’re making a name for yourself as Dr. Masters, M. D.”

“You know M. D. stands for Medical Doctor? What you said was the most redundant…”

“Meg.” Castiel covers her hand with his and takes him to his lips to kiss her. “I think you should go for it. I know you’ll do great.”

Meg blinks a couple of times. Then a beam blooms in her lips.

“What did I do to deserve you?” she asks, moving her chair closer to his.

“I don’t know,” Castiel replies. He puts her arms around her as she sits on his lap and smiles at her. “I’m glad you’re moving on from the things that hurt you, though.”

“Yeah. Not the only one, by the looks of it.” Meg jerks her head at the box he left on the floor.

“I’ve already moved on,” Castiel clarifies. He brushes her hair aside and kisses her neck. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”


End file.
